By Tom Toth
News for low-income households facing another brutal winter in New England is again bleak. One of the largest energy providers in the region announced recently that energy costs for a typical household could top $150 a month this winter — a 37 percent increase over just last year.
For many poorer families, that $40 per month increase will force a choice between purchasing enough food to feed a cold family or warming the bedrooms they return to — malnourished, or suffering otherwise from a lack of household resources to fund Obama’s jihad on affordable energy.
Yet not a sentence of concern has been uttered from the environmental alarmists in the Obama administration and its radical EPA as the poor disproportionately carry the burden of “green energy.”
“Green energy,” named for invoking images of green in nature, is defined by the EPA as energy “whose generation has zero/negligible environmental impacts.” But the human toll for the “zero/ negligible environmental impacts” of this energy is yet uncharacterized. Perhaps images of the inefficient energy options that force blue-lipped children to sleep in unheated bedrooms would be more aptly labeled “blue energy.”
EPA head — and, ironically enough, Massachusetts native — Gina McCarthy has presided over the Obama administration’s assault on New England’s poor.
Under McCarthy, regulations have killed the future of affordable coal-fired energy, inexpensive natural gas development is at risk, and once-alternative options are now more limited than ever before in recent memory — highlighted by the 80 percent of traditional wood stoves (as in, burning wood for heat … if it gets more “green” than that, let me know) now banned by the EPA from production and sale in the United States.
I write this as a transplanted New England native, who grew up three miles down a dirt road in a log home with a wood stove (that’s now illegal to manufacture) to supplement home heating expenses. The neighbors who already struggle through the winter months to make ends meet now face the unnecessary, expensive consequences of Obama’s policies.
It is on the backs of these New England families the EPA is pursuing its radical mission to kill efficient energy production, masked by the unproven, abstract goal of clean air and cool temperatures — both things New Englanders actually possesses in excess.
But, realistically, who actually cares? New Englanders vote reliably with the party of environmental radicalism and the poor families suffering most couldn’t afford to scratch a check to a Super PAC or take a Saturday to campaign if they wanted to.
If energy prices are ever to stop increasing year over year, the people of New England and the rest of the American people must decide if they’re willing to make abundantly clear to those holding elected office that the well-being of families comes before any political agenda — and that statement must start now.
Martha Coakley and Mike Michaud, the Democrat candidates for Governor in Massachusetts and Maine respectively, each hold long, uncompromised records supporting Obama’s “blue energy” agenda, along with dozens of candidates from each state. If the people of New England and the United States want to send a message about the well-being of themselves and their neighbors to Washington and state capitols like Boston and Augusta, the loudest megaphone opens at 7:00 a.m. on November 4.
Tom Toth is the digital content director and a contributing editor for Americans for Limited Government.
